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"John the Evangelist as 'summus secretarius' in Medieval Music, Exegesis, and Iconography"

Presented by Catherine Saucier

Associate Professor of Music History, ASU School of Music

President, Phoenix Early Music Society

Monday, October 20, 2014 at 1:00pm
Lattie F. Coor Hall, Room 4403
ASU Tempe CampusFree and open to the public

About the Program
Who is the “highest secretary” hailed at the outset of the fifteenth-century motet 'Summus secretarius' and what is this figure's relationship to the biblical and cosmological references in the ensuing lines? Drawing on exegetical writings on the Fourth Gospel and the medieval iconography of St John the Evangelist, we find the tools with which to decipher the language and imagery of music that has long remained elusive.

About Catherine Saucier
Catherine Saucier, Associate Professor of Music History at Arizona State University and Affiliate Faculty of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Music History from The University of Chicago and a B.M. in Cello Performance from Indiana University. Dr. Saucier specializes in late medieval and Renaissance sacred music and city culture in the Low Countries, and has conducted extensive archival and liturgical research in Liège, Belgium, supported by grants and fellowships from the Quebec government, the Medieval Academy of America, The University of Chicago, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and ASU. She has presented her research at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the Royal Musical Association (Med-Ren), the Gregorian Institute of Canada, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), and has collaborated with other faculty at ASU through interdisciplinary research projects supported by the Institute for Humanities Research.